This meeting on cytokinesis will be sponsored by the American Society of Cell Biology (ASCB). Topics of these meetings are generally proposed by ASCB members and selected by a committee based on its significance, timeliness, interest, and strengths of organizers and potential speakers. The meeting will be held at the University of Vermont, Burlington, on July 22-25, 2004. Cytokinesis, the last step of cell division, is critical to many physiological and pathological processes including embryonic development, wound healing, skeletomuscular functions, immune responses, and cancerous growth. The field has undergone dramatic advances since the last meeting in the United States 14 years ago, incorporating a large number of new experimental methods, biological systems, and functional models, and attracting many new investigators with diverse expertise. A comprehensive meeting on this topic is viewed by the cell biology community as urgent for the development of the field and stimulatory for many other fields of basic and clinical research. The meeting will be organized around functional aspects of cytokinesis, and will include sessions on cortical assembly and contraction, membrane dynamics, interactions with mitosis, and findings obtained by new genomic and non-genomic approaches. The presentations will be delivered by a mixture of invited speakers and speakers selected from submitted abstracts. The latter will be primarily young investigators, while the former will be visionaries giving balanced presentations between new results and general perspectives. There will also be a poster session to foster one-to-one interactions. This format is expected to be maximally educational and stimulatory to an audience of approximately 200, which will be evenly distributed among trainees and junior and senior investigators. The meeting is expected to mediate intense discussions in search of common principles of cytokinesis, and to stimulate new interdisciplinary collaborations.